Action-Based Discretization for AI Search

As computer gaming reaches ever-greater heights in realism, we can expect the complexity of simulated dynamics to reach further as well. To populate such gaming environments with agents that behave intelligently, there must be some means of reasoning about the consequences of agent actions. Such ability to seek out the ramifications of various possible action sequences, commonly called “lookahead”, is found in programs that play chess, but there are special challenges that face game programmers who wish to apply AI search techniques to complex continuous dynamical systems. In particular, the game programmer must “discretize” the problem, that is, approximate the continuous problem as a discrete problem suitable for an AI search algorithm.